For centuries, composers have used the key of C major to depict the sunnier side of the emotional palette, everything from mild contentment to transcendent bliss. But as the cannily planned and powerfully executed San Francisco Symphony program on Wednesday, Sept. 14, reminded us, those sensations can often be both hard-won and ephemeral.

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas began the evening by giving the audience a partial guideline to the proceedings. He pointed out that all three works on the program — symphonies by Haydn, Sibelius and Beethoven — were in C, and offered a few words from theorists of the past about the traditional expressive associations of that key.

It was left to the performances themselves to fill in the rest of the underlying theme — namely, not so fast there, Charlie. C major doesn’t come easy.

Beethoven’s Fifth, which will also be the focus of Sunday afternoon’s “Discovery” concert, has been the central text in this musical-moral sermon ever since its premiere. The forceful narrative of its last two movements — in which the eerie minor-key shadows of the scherzo are dispelled, not once but twice, by the triumphant blaze of C major — marked a new sort of dramatic plan for the symphony, which Beethoven’s followers have been reckoning with ever since.

And the Symphony’s performance in Davies Symphony Hall underscored this quasi-operatic narrative with particular vehemence and brilliance. The first two movements of the piece rolled out forcibly enough, but there were clipped corners here and there in both phrasing and tempo.

With the onset of the scherzo, though, and the insinuating, tiptoeing theme that E.M. Forster unforgettably characterized in “Howards End” as the tread of goblins, things got real in a hurry. The coiled tension in that movement verged on the unbearable, and the potent blasts of the brass — arriving on the scene to herald the finale like some gleaming rescue squad — brought a flood of relief.

The entire program had been carefully plotted to prepare that moment, with a series of graduated steps that increasingly complicated the emotional landscape. Haydn’s Symphony No. 69 in C, subtitled “Laudon,” began the evening in a burst of sheer exuberance.

This was the Symphony’s first go-round with this particular score (there are, after all, 104 Haydn symphonies, give or take, and some are going to fall through the cracks), and it made a welcome and overdue debut. The outer movements bustle along with all the joy and vitality that marks Haydn’s music at its best, and the minuet and scherzo — replete with a delightful micro-concerto for oboe splendidly delivered by principal Eugene Izotov — only increase the bumptious charm.

Are there shadows? Perhaps just a bit in the slow movement, which sets sail on a shimmery, slightly rueful bed of string harmonies, and offered concertmaster Alexander Barantschik a chance to sing everyone a soulful lullaby.

Those shadows only increased in Sibelius’ Third Symphony, which got a gorgeous and impeccably characterized reading. There’s unruffled clarity in the opening movement, and a Beethovenian blaze of brass to close.

But in between comes the heart of this wonderful symphony — an extended, ruminative dance that keeps shifting emphasis and tone in an elusive play of harmony and color. The orchestra’s rendition was well-nigh perfect.